I was paging through the Relay.FM guests the other day and noticed my friend Dave Wiskus and clicked to see what shows he was on. I saw one of them was talking about one of his favorite albums Hot Fuss. I decided to relisten to the episode since I am more familiar with The Killers now than when the show was originally released.

Dave brings up a good point near the end of the show. He mentions that years ago music listeners had to go to the record store and spend money on a full album. These purchases said something about them and defined the kind of music they were into.

Between online music stores and now streaming, that whole model is upended. As Dave points out, you pay Apple Music or Spotify for the ability to stream nearly the world’s catalog of music.

This observation made me reflect on my own musical renaissance. When I first got an iPod, I began to fill it with all different kinds of music. In my youth I would… find a lot of things off the back of a truck. If I liked a song by a band I’d just grab the whole discography. My liberal use of μTorrent allowed me to explore music with zero cost. The result was asking my parents for a lot of CDs and and concert tickets1.

With streaming music services, me and millions of others continue to experience new music in a zero risk environment2. When people ask me what kind of music I am into, I frequently say I like anything where I can appreciate an intentionality in the composition. Some days I am rocking out to prog rock, the label I would have perpetuated in the record era. But today its equally as likely I’m listening to Top 40s, jazz, R&B, you name it.

I’m confident I never would have given this music the time of day if I grew up in a different era. The radio lacks the immediacy of streaming which I think is critical. If someone tells me to check out an album, moments later it is streaming to my ears.

I possess no single music identity and I’m grateful to live in an era of musical privilege.

Budget

Well, this month sorta broke the budget. But I saw that coming, somewhat. Lucky for me, March was a three paycheck month.

I spent more eating out than I wanted to, even though I inflated the budget for post engagement eating out and our preplanned nice dinner the day after1. I felt like I got a bit more lax after I broke the budget, which is a bad habit. When I saw myself doing that I tried to tighten things up. I’ll be important to bounce back next month, particularly with our vacation coming up the month after.

Unfortunately, I noticed two days ago a bulge in my front tire’s sidewall. Not a good thing. I ended up having to replace all the tires, which wasn’t too bad since 3/4 were originals with 43k miles on them and the other about 30k miles. That was a pretty penny though. Low profile tires on 18 inch rims look cool, but they come at a cost. I didn’t have enough planned in car repairs this year, but luckily I had some slush funds that I didn’t allocate for that reason. Next year I will allocate significantly more for my car.

Cooking

I did end up hosting a big Chicken and Waffles night and it was a success. We borrowed Rachel’s parent’s fryer and I had to get that thing out of the house before I started trying to fry all the things. I met my goal of times eating lunch out, and it was always a social aspect either with friends or my team.

Losing Weight

I didn’t have a measuring tape. But I did go under 230 for the first time this month. I ended the month right at 230 for 4 pounds lost in the month. It was good to see a full month of the graph trending downward.

I am looking forward to getting more outside activity in now that the weather is getting better. Yesterday we went on a nice hike at a park in Baltimore City and I hope to do more of that this year.

iOS

Well, I bought a flight, tickets to Alt Conf and their Podcast Festival, and an AirBNB. San Jose, here I come.

As I wrote earlier this month, I’m at a bit of a development stand still because of Marzipan. But to be totally honest with myself, I didn’t make it a priority with all the other things going on in my life.

It will be hard to find the time for app development with work, grad school, and life’s other distractions. I hope I leave San Jose ready to write some code. I am taking Android Development for grad school this summer so I hope I learn some transferable skills / am able to write some algorithms that I can convert over to Swift for my actual apps.

Miscellaneous

I didn’t end up tidying up my desk much more… This month passed me by. After I was done prepping and thinking about proposing, I was in a whirlwind of celebratory hangs and wedding chatter. I hope that dies down a bit this month and I am able to focus on a few more things in life. A micro goal for this month is launch the podcast I have been working on with my friend Jun. We have two episodes done and ready to release, we just need a logo and a site at this point.